A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Saturday, July 19, 2008

UNPUBLISHED LETTERS SINCE JAN - SPOT THE TREND OF WHAT DOESN'T GET OUT

Some letters I didn't get published & haven't previously put up=================================3rd July - to 23 papers UK & US

It has gone widely unreported that Nasir Oric the Moslem commander of Srebrenica & responsible for the genocide of an identified 3,800 Serbs from surrounding villages, has had his sentence for a lesser crime quashed. The reason why he was not actually charged for this major genocide in Srebrenica may be that the bodies have been identified as those of Moslem troops (even the children's bodies) & this is the only real evidence that what we may call the "official" Srebrenica massacre ever happened. An admission of Oric's genocide would make such a contention difficult, particularly in light of the fact that he showed journalists videos from his extensive home video collection of him beheading civilians.

On effect of quashing his sentence is that he will be allowed to enter politics again.

I would like to take this opportunity to call for the release & quashing of the sentence of Fiket Abdic. He was the most popular pre-war Moslem leader in Bosnia, a genuine multiculturalist & free market supporting moderate. During the war he led the defence of his home province, Bihac against our then al Quaeda friends in the Bosnian Moslem army who whose press gangs had been trying to operate in the area.

For this he was sentenced to 20 years.

He is exactly the sort of moderate Moslem we normally call on to stand up against al Quaeda & the extremists yet, because we were supporting genocidal ex-Nazi Moslem separatists a man who is clearly innocent of any crime other than self defence is kept in prison for purely political reasons.

If there were any interest whatsoever in turning Bosnia & Herzegovina into a "nation" we would be welcoming Fikret Abdic as someone whom both communities can trust rather than the undeniably genocidal Nasir Oric.

I find it most unfortunate that the western media has, with Stalinesque unanimity, treated Mr Abdic as an unperson both during that war & since even though Lord Owen had described him as "different from the Sarajevan Muslims. He was in favour of negotiating and compromising with Croats and Serbs to achieve a settlement, and scathing about those Muslims who wanted to block any such settlement."

Sincerely

Neil Craig

PS I would not object to you cutting this letter. I can say from experience that the media refusal to treat Abdic as other than an unperson is entirely real & reflects very badly on any suggestion of media impartiality in either Britain or the USA.==============================5th April Scotsman

I recently supported the Scotsman over its willingness to print without fear or favour (letter 12th March) as being an example of good journalistic ethics. Unfortunately the entire media have failed this test a few days ago.

Buried deep in Carla.del Ponte's book of her role as Yugoslav war crimes prosecutor, published last week, is an admission that, that because of information supplied by "reliable journalists" (i.e. western ones) she has known for years of the KLA, under the authority of the NATO occupiers, kidnapping at least 300 Serb teenagers & perhaps 1,300 of them, dissecting them & selling the parts to hospitals in the NATO countries. She did a very cursory investigation which proved it happened & immediately stopped.

Had this happened under the rule of Adolph Hitler it would, correctly, be excoriated annually as one of the worst obscenities of the Holocaust. Had anything even remotely comparable been happening under Chinese rule in Tibet it would have had banner headlines in every western newspaper.

Though this has been reported by Pravda, among others & on the net, western written & broadcast coverage has been essentially limited to one small item on Fox news & a couple of mentions in the Italian press. The fact that this was carried out under the authority of our government & allies, with the knowledge of western journalists & beyond doubt of western intelligence & funded by western health services does not make it less newsworthy. The monolithic decision of our media not to report this is not to be commended.

I note the massive media coverage of what is alleged to be an overreaction by the Chinese government to race riots by the Dalai Lama's followers in which, perhaps, 10 people may have died. That is excluding the Chinese civilians murdered by the rioters , such as 5 women in a shop burned down.

While the media's determination to report on events across the world is admirable may I ask why we have seen zero reporting, at least in the British media, of the admission by Carla del Ponte, the NATO appointed Yugoslav War Crimes Prosecutor, that she had taken no action to trece the members of the KLA/NATO police who kidnapped 300 Serb teenagers, dissected them & sold thei body parts to hospitals across Europe. At the very least tracing the hospitals to which these organs were flown would be simple.

Just prior to us going tom war to help the KLA Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Parliament that it was the KLA, not the Serbs, who were practicing genocide. Whatever one may believe of the Chinese leaders, Mugabe, Milosevic or any other enemy of the day none of them can be accused of anything comparable to this atrocity to which our dear leaders have been accessories. Even Hitler never engaged in this act of cannibalism. ============================================23rd March Daily Record

The Trump project was first mooted by him in April 2006. It seems that permission, if given, will not come until spring 2009. Ignoring the questions this must raise in the minds of anybody proposing to invest here & the 3 years of jobs lost the normal accountancy assumption is that a £1 billion investment would produce about £120 million in assorted taxes annually. Perhaps those who support such delays or indeed delays of infinite length might care to explain what cuts in Scottish government expenditure they have supported to make up the missing £360 million? =======================================25th Feb Herald

In criticising Professor MacDonald's suggestions for improving our economy John MacLaren announces a figure of 1.86% being the average growth rate in both Scotland & the US, but over an unspecified period. Such precision in figures would not be credible even if the time period were specified. In any case US growth has been higher than that as I assume he knows because says this is "GDP per capita" - the US [population has been growing, again nobody knows the precise figures but it is now officially over 300 million, while Scotland's is falling.

Next we have the claim that growth will not always increase exactly 1% for every 10% cut in corporation tax. Of course not & Professor MacDonald never said it would be so precise. Indeed looking at Ireland it is quite clear that it's 7% growth is better than its 30% cut in Corporation Tax, would on this assumption lead us to expect. Indeed Professor MacDonald's 1 to 10 ratio is, if anything, conservative by international experience.

Where Mr Maclaren is correct is in saying that there are "a large variety of other factors". which would improve growth. Indeed the Professor has alluded in the past to such things as cutting regulations, allowing an expansion of housebuilding & improving transport infrastructure & I stood for election on those grounds & also for replacing our ageing nuclear power stations with new reliable nuclear power at half the present cost rather than,, as all the other parties did, with unreliable windmills at twice the price.

Unfortunately, in all his criticism of the Professor his college has forgotten to produce any suggestions of what these factors leading to growth are, in his opinion. That would have been a more constructive contribution to the debate. =========================21st Feb

Having published a letter on Thursday calling the probable but unproven deaths of some soldiers by the wicked, evil & dreadful English a mass grave, though it happened nearly 4 centuries ago may I hope you will publish about the genocide of 210 civilians in the British zone of Kosovo, indeed only hundreds of yards from British HQ & dumped in a mass grave which our government say is not a mass grave (legal evidence of genocide) but 210 single graves in the same place.

The media has ignored the Dragodan Massacre, in the British Zone, shortly after we took over, where the KLA, now enrolled as "police" were allowed to deliberately murder 210 unarmed civilians. In total the various acts of genocide under NATO protection probably exceed 6,000. Also many thousands of schoolgirls were kidnapped off the streets & sold to western brothels, run by KLA supporters. The media have also failed to mention evidence that the flight of refugees was caused by NATO bombing rather than anything the Yugoslavs did. This meant ignoring a number of instances of refugees saying just that (though the translators usually didn't translate) or that a larger proportion of the Serb than of the Albanian population fled.

One would not wish to think that by reporting the Dunbar episode while ignoring atrocities both greater in extent & many centuries more current the media might be leaving itself open to accusations of racism - against the English that would be.===========================21st Feb Herald

In his report of the Kosovo celebration Harry Reid is extremely one sided. Where is his report of the "celebrations" of the 350,000 Serbs ethnically cleansed from their homes by NATO "police" to make way for Albanian immigrants? Where the mention of the thousands of victims of genocide under our government?

He says "Serbia - and like most civilised people I don't think much of it". What an obscene racist statement. As a British journalist he knows that he & his ilk lied for 18 years to portray people like Tudjman, Izetbegovic & the KLA leaders as multi ethnic when they knew for a fact that they were unrepentant (ex-)Nazis who had publicly proclaimed their commitment to genocide. He knew then & knows now that the overwhelming bulk of civilian killing was done by NATO's openly Nazi catspaws.

Indeed to give it its due the Herald is the only newspaper which was willing to publish my letter about Denies McShane's public admission of our "police" having carried out the Dragodan Massacre of 210 unarmed civilians in our zone of Kosovo.

I consider myself civilised. But it is not the same "civilisation" as Mr Reid professes where genocide is happily practised & child sex slavery enjoyed all for the purpose of driving out the "untermensch" & imposing united Reich on Europe. He is actively supporting the policies of the Swastika. My view of civilisation is less bloodthirsty.

Neil Craig

It will be interesting to see if you permit the facts on both sides to be published================================21st Feb HeraldThe question of which country is no 1 in wealth ratings is not quite as clear cut as who has most points in football matches. Some systems of measurement show differences from others - but they are all very close. It is therefore somewhat foolish to criticise Professor MacDonald's critique of Scotland's economic decline & suggestion that we would have done better had we adopted Ireland's policies by saying that the US may, by some measures be behind Luxembourg

Looking at the GeographyIQ site I see that, excluding very small countries with financial systems which distort the picture |(Luxembourg, Bermuda) & oil rich ones (Equatorial Guinea, United Arab Emirates, Norway) the only country richer than the US is Ireland.

Since, prior to their low business tax, low regulation reforms in 1990 Ireland was a poor country with a standard of living only 2/3rds of ours the Professor's case seems proved. We could do the same if our politicans would make the effort. Looking further down the list it is clear that the wealthiest countries & even moreso the fastest growing are those where government gets out of the way & lets enterprise work.===========================20th Feb Scotsman

The western media have unanimously pushed the claim that the Serbs drove the refugees from Kosovo thus "proving" the moral case for bombing.

The truth is the exact opposite. The refugees fled because they were in the target zone 10s of thousands of NATO bombs. This is proven by the fact of many interviews with refugees who said this (though their western provided translators didn't) It is also proven by the fact that a larger proportion of the Serb than of the Albanian population fled, albeit deeper into Serbia There is also the instance of the Albanian refugee convoy which NATO bombed, killing 334. This convoy was returning to their homes, having been persuaded by Yugoslav officials that the "cleansing" story was a lie perpetrated by the KLA & NATO & that they were safe to return. That they weren't was not in any way whatsoever the fault of the Yugoslavs.

All this has could only have been censored by media willing to tell any lie whatsoever in support of NATO's deliberate racial genocide.

The "democratic right" of the Albanian immigrants to Kosovo rests on the deliberate genocide & ethnic cleansing carried out, under NATO authority by the NATO police (as the KLA have since become). For example, shortly after we took over the British occupation authorities deliberately allowed their "police" to murder 210 unarmed civilians in the Dragodan Massacre. ===========================17th Feb Scotland on Sunday

Your article today about the poor little Albanian boy whose family was being forced to leave their home merely because the real owners wanted to return from being ethnically cleansed would have brought a tear to a glass eye.

I remember a Viz "news" story written in tabloid style about a poor little kid upset because its daddy wasn't coming home after a dispute over who somebody else had "been looking at" - as the story unfolded it was clear that the refusal of the authorities to return the father was because he had murdered in a pub knifing.

This article about a poor little kid upset because they, unlike to overwhelming majority of cases in Kosovo, have not been allowed to permanently steal some body's home is similar except that apparently it is not self satire.

This is another example of the completely dishonest reporting our media have done for the last 18 years deliberately portraying people they know to be out & out Nazis publicly committed to genocide in a favourable light.===============================15th Feb Herald

Professor MacDonald (letter Friday) is undeniably right that the lowering of business taxes & regulations is what got the Irish economy growing. The link between cutting taxes & regulations in 1989 & high growth from 1990 is so close that it cannot be credibly denied. That being the case there is no reason why any party in Scotland committed to progress should, or indeed reasonably could, oppose getting the power to cut such taxes here & I think most parties in Scotland will come to this. However the theoretical power will not achieve anything unless it is used & it is noticeable that, for all their promises, the SNP's cut of business rates has been both limited & delayed.

A Green's MSP has said that he actively opposes the "continuous economic growth" we are apparently suffering from & some "Liberals" share this view. Solidarity & the SSP are more interested in destroying capitalism (& each other) than in economic success. There are also elements in the Labour party whose political survival depends on their constituents suffering from "dependency culture" but most politicians are in favour of economic success, though they may not give it the priority I would.

Ireland has gone from having an income 2/3rds of ours in 1989 to matching, some figures say surpassing, that of the USA today. We could have done the same & it is quite remarkable how little this has been noticed in the Westminster political scene. I think Professor MacDonald deserves thanks for having shown how very central to almost ever form of national success or failure economic growth is.=================================12th Feb Scotsman

Elements of the Westminster government wish to draw a line in the sand over new powers for Scotland. On the other hand while more power is touted as the magic mantra to success there seems little agreement on what powers or what to do with them. The income tax power which only a few mavericks like me have suggested should be lowered (& even fewer raised) suggests magic is less useful in practice than politician's theory. Ireland's growth was started by cutting Corporation Tax which is why the SNP promises to do it here "after independence". Most of the other parties are, at least nominally, in favour of growth & could also call for repatriation of this power. The real reason we didn't get it was because back in 1999, there were more "socialists" per capita than in England who might have raised CT & thus destroyed the economy (as a Mr McConnell did indeed raise business rates). That devolution has matured us is proven by the fact that pressure is now for reductions & economic success rather than merely more spending, from all major parties.

Paradoxically, though the SNP officially want to cut CT the Tories have had to lead them in cutting business rates, which is the very similar power we do have. The SNP have talked well of going for growth, but over the last year have done less. That being the case Westminster would be constructing a trap for themselves by refusing this reform. It would allow the SNP an excuse to complain without having to take the tough decisions.

The very best Unionist option would be for Westminster to learn the Irish lesson as well & cut CT to get the whole UK economy growing, but being more parochial than Scotland they have barely noticed the economic miracle across the Irish Sea. ====================================29th Jan Scotsman & Herald

If the Lewis windfarm proposal is to be rejected it seems that the island's main industry, tourism, will survive after all. Hitrans say improving ferry timetables & fares, which would bring in £22 million worth of trade, which is much more than the windfarm would have done. It also is increasingly clear that windmills will not save us & if we are to prevent the lights going we need nuclear.

As the only party at the last election to have strongly supported the necesssary nuclear build the 9% Growth Party have suggested 2 even more innovative solutions to Highland & Island development.

Currently the subsidy to Highlands & Islands airports is 2/3rds of the total cost however traffic is so low that this still produces landing charges far higher than those at big airports, which in turn ensures low traffic. If the subsidy were increased to 100% of the cost landing charges would be zero &the Easyjets & Ryanairs of the world would be attracted to provide the sort of service that could attract substantial tourism business.

The Norwegians have, for 2 decades, been building tunnels at about £7 million per km. On this basis a road tunnel would be perfectly feasible & indeed the Norwegians have built such. The 9% Growth party have also suggested improving most of the west of Scotland's transport with similar, but shorter tunnels to Mull, Arran, Jura, Islay, Bute & under the Clyde at Dunoon & under Loch Fyne. All of these could be done for less than what is being spent on a tramline in Edinburgh.

We hope that as the Labour & Tory Party have recently decided wec were right & they were wrong over nuclear they will also come to support our other policies too.=============================20th Jan Scotland on Sunday

George Leslie asks (letter today) for scientists to give him figures of nuclear power costs & the advantages & disadvantages thereof. I am surprised he has ben unable to find this because they are easily available online.

May I suggest Professor John McCarthy's excellent site which goes into detail on all the anti-nuclearist arguments & shows them to be disingenuous? It is available on http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html . The professor is widely considered one of the world's more intelligent people & may even be smarter than Micheal Meacher & the people running the Green Party.

I agree that the debate on power policy & indeed many other things would benefit from more attention to scientific facts & less to Luddite hysteria, ============================16th Jan Scotsman

May I agree with Steuart Campbell's criticism of the Scotsman's claim that nobody is for going largely nuclear like France. The 9% Growth Party stood in Glasgow in the Holyrood election on such a platform. It was important for democracy that people have a chance to vote for the an alternative to the non-nuclear positions of the SNP, Labour, Tory, Libdem, Green, SSP&S Parties. While we did not get the coverage, or votes, we think this alternative deserves we have the satisfaction of seeing, only months later, that both the Labour & Tory Parties say people should vote for pretty much our policy rather than what they stood for.

Hopefully, in years to come, some of our other policies will be adopted. Very hopefully not to many years will be wasted in the interim.============================11th Jan 8 UK papers

Formerly we got 20% of our electricity from nuclear power but that is declining & it will not be that long till it is gone. Now we also get about 20% from high emission coal power which will have to be ended in 2015 under EU rules. Rising electricity prices are with us & blackouts far closer than the horizon. Suddenly Gordon Brown appears on his white charger, armed with "unanimous" agreement from cabinet for building new nuclear plants (well ok to allow French & US engineers to build them). The Tories run along behind shouting "us too".

One would hardly believe that this is the same Labour Party which spent 10 years denouncing nuclear as an "unattractive option" & using the regulator to destroy British Nuclear (forcing them to sell cheaply an American subsidiary which, in Japanese hands, is likely to be a contractor for our new generators). Nor would one believe that these are the Tories who, only months ago, said nuclear should be the last option. Clearly it is, The probability of blackouts is concentrating minds wonderfully.

However this last minute rescue is less than it seems to be. To build a new reactor takes 4 years in the rest of the world but we are told to expect our in 10 to 15 years. This will not prevent the lights going out. The reason for this is that the regulators want to spend at least 5 years certifying that the designs, which have worked for decades in Amerca & france actually work & that the desired sites, almost exclusively where reactors stand or stood because that is where the infrastructure & experienced workers are, could possible provide a home to a new reactor. This is nonsense. We already have 24,000 pensioners dying annually because of hypothermia & it will be far worse if lights go out. It is unconscionable that people should die because a modern power system must wait on bureaucrats spending years acknowledging the obvious.

We would have no probelm if politicians had acted 10 years ago. Now that they recognise the facts they must not let more time be wasted.

Friday, July 18, 2008

I don't warrant this as being more than gossip & it has not received any dead tree coverage. On the other hand if there is anything to it at all the people & even more the air force who were being used to bomb Serbia to help this openly genocidal monster (I mean the Albanian leader) ought to know.

The Clinton regime does seem to have expected & normally got an enormous amount of blatant lying & cover up by the western media over Yugoslavia which may explain why Hilary thought she could get away with her "landing under fire" lie. I don't think this could have gone unnoticed so we should expect either some fulsome denials or some "non-denial denials" as they said in the Nixon era.

This is like something told about one of the more decadent of Roman Emperors (Caligula comes to mind). If there is anything to it & I have underestimated the depth of western behaviour over Yugoslavia several times before, then it must be aired. If there isn't & it has been made up that must be aired too.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Dear Editor,In April the Yugoslav war crimes prosecutor, published her autobiography.. In it is an admission that, because of information supplied by "reliable journalists" (i.e. western ones), she has known for years that the KLA, under the authority of the NATO occupiers, kidnapped at least 300 Serb teenagers & perhaps 1,300 of them, dissected them & sold the parts to hospitals in the NATO countries. She did a very cursory investigation which proved it happened & immediately stopped.

Had this happened under the rule of Adolph Hitler it would, correctly, be denounced as one of the worst obscenities of the Holocaust. Had anything even remotely comparable been happening under Chinese rule in Tibet it would have had banner headlines in every western newspaper. Had Mugabe or the President of Sudan done it they would have been indicted for crimes against humanity.

The fact that this was carried out under the authority of our government & allies, with the knowledge of western journalists & beyond doubt of western intelligence & funded by western health services does not make it less newsworthy. Democracy depends on the people being told the truth. Why has this been reported on the Internet & Pravda but absent from virtually all print & broadcast media across the NATO countries?

Yours SincerelyNeil Craig

This letter went out a few days ago 28 newspapers across Scotland, the UK & the US in emails headed "War crimes unreported when "Our" side does them". It is a slight variation in a similar letter sent out on 7th April to 19 papers under the title "NATO protects organleggers".

So far as I can determine not only were neither of these letters, nor another one about Nasir Oric published by any media outlet but total world newspaper coverage of this atrocity can be seen on a Google News search & is almost entirely limited to Serbian & Montenegrin papers.

Having had a considerable number of letters published over the years I would estimate I have had above a 50% publication rate, though much lower when dealing with national papers outwith Scotland (papers do like their letters to be local). In this case we have 47 letters & apparently not one of the recipients thought them publishable. I can say without any question whatsoever that it is a statistical impossibility that this is chance. It is undeniable that virtually the entire western press is complicit in a deliberate programme of censorship of what they know to be a NATO authorised atrocity of a level, of obscenity that even Hitler never sank to.

I will not claim to be surprised at this total contempt for honest journalistic standards by all these papers as both titles I used show. I am a little disappointed that they all failed the test set.

Let nobody suggest that any reports about alleged abuses in Darfur or Tibet or Zimbabwe or wherever that get spread across the papers are, (even when they are not proven faked), in any way whatsoever motivated by a desire to report real news.

I also mentioned the Barry George case & the thousands of schoolgirls kidnapped & sold by our KLA friends. It looks likely that Barry will get justice but the Kosovo schoolgirls remain unpersons to our media. Indeed with del Ponte admitting knowing the KLA had been dissecting people & selling us the organs their fate looks worse than ever.

Meanwhile the enquiry into the Stockline explosion is working slowly on. So far no discussion of the way a number of people who were known to be alive & using mobile phones to call for help some time after the explosion weren't dug out for days, by which time they were dead.

This is unlikely to prevent blackouts since most of Britain's reactors will have closed by then as will the high emission coal generators since new EU rules come in in 2015.

The EU is, at least officially, pushing for acceptance across the EU of each other's reactor licencing standards. We could quite easily decide that designs which have been licenced & working in France for decades would work under the laws of physics on this side of the Channel too. We could do the same for Canadian designs if we thought Canada as reliable as France :-) Building new reactors at the sites of current reactors, which makes economic sense since it means the sites don't have to be greenfielded, the distribution infrastructure is already there & so is the trained manpower.

There is no excuse whatsoever for spending 5 years, or indeed more than 5 weeks doing paperwork before actually allowing the builders to build. On the other hand it does ensure gainful employment for legions of parasites & is likely to double the cost & give plenty of time for introducing lots of useless & expensive regulations. The eco-fascists, having promised repeatedly that nuclear is expensive & slow to build will do anything to artificially fulfil their prophecy but we know that reactors can be built in 4 years because it has been done & can produce power at 1.3p a unit because it also has been done.

out of 27,110,727. So they got 290,000. Dividing the cost of environmentalism of £1.4 trillion between them shows that each Green voter costs the country £4.8 million annually. Lets only add 10% for current costs (£1 billion subsidy of windmills in Scotland, 70% of the transport budget going on rail which is only 3% of journeys, endless regulations & reviews pushing up the price of public projects 13 fold, more than doubling the cost of the electricity we could be getting form nuclear, 75% of housing costs being regulatory etc etc) & we get £5.3 million each annually.

Nobody's vote is worth that so I am coming round to the belief that the eco-fascist movement is not so much the leader of the wave of state enforced "environmentalism" as the inevitable detritus being carried by it. Empire building among "public servants" & the inevitable need to keep finding something for their ever growing numbers to do is what has created this mess. Once government is committed to pushing all sorts of silliness in this cause & giving massive publicity to anybody supporting it it becomes inevitable that some people will take it seriously enough to stand for election.

As anybody can see from the BBC report mentioned above we can be certain that the state broadcaster will give extremely flattering coverage to the party, far eclipsing that given in this case to the winner